Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. Protecting information is often part of a routine process that is performed within an organization.
A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, in addition to protecting data. For instance, companies often implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time and data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc.
Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset. Along these lines, customers are looking for solutions that not only protect and manage, but also leverage their data. For instance, solutions providing data analysis capabilities, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
Snapshots can provide point-in-time copies of production data that can be restored for reference at a future time. In certain systems, a single logical volume of data (e.g., LUN) may have data stored therein associated with a plurality of different applications/agents. Snapshots are often taken of an entire logical volume even when only one of the associated applications is requesting the snapshot. If a snapshot is taken of the entire volume in order to accommodate a request of one application, or a subset of applications associated with the volume, the snapshot data not associated with the requesting application may be unused, thereby creating system inefficiency.